Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

  Even in the raucous crowd here at the Garden, Pardo’s voice stands out, and the Minnesota coach shoots a look toward its source before squatting in the middle of his sweating players and pulling out his clipboard to diagram a play.

  “That’s right, you bastard. The Penta Hotel — room three thirteen. Lock your door, champ!”

  Coach Saunders turns again and looks hard into the crowd. We aren’t more than twenty feet away, thanks to the firm, but Pardo is back in his seat now and just one in a sea of hostile faces, all of whom saw, in today’s Post, Saunders’s quote that he’d never cared for New York, and many of whom came early to let him know the feeling was mutual. “What are you looking at, prick?” yells a guy just behind us. “Don’t you got a game to lose, asshole?” comes from our left. Saunders turns back to his team, and Pardo drinks his beer, smiling. Thirty seconds later, when the scorekeeper’s horn sends the players back onto the court, he puts his hands to his mouth again.

  “Room three thirteen, you bastard! Wait’ll you see what room service has for you!”

  Saunders looks back again, and then he motions an assistant off the bench and whispers to him, and the assistant walks to the end of the bench and calls over a plainclothes security guard from the first row. Pardo looks triumphantly at Jeremy and me.

  “That’s really his room,” he says.

  I look at him.

  “No bull, Jake. I’m banging the desk clerk at the Penta.”

  “Jesus,” says Jeremy.

  “Am I in this guy’s head, or what?” says Pardo.

  The security guy wades into our section, a wire running from his ear down into his dark blue suit. His eyes are on the three of us. “Who’s yelling out room numbers?” he asks. Pardo looks at him defiantly and taps his chest with his beer cup. The guard looks him over. “Good for you,” he says. “The prick’s too good for New York, let him take care of himself.”

  We watch the guard walk back to the bench and shrug at the nonplussed assistant coach.

  “Jesus,” says Jeremy again, his eyes widening in the look of wonder that Pardo is forever bringing to them.

  “Go, Spree!” says Pardo, as Sprewell knocks the ball away off the coach’s ill-designed in-bounds play and streaks the other way for a dunk, bringing us and the sellout crowd to our feet. “Nice play call, asshole!” Pardo calls out.

  Pardo and Jeremy are an unlikely pair. Pardo was a classmate and fellow pledge up at Ham Tech. An athlete, like me, admitted into the ’93 freshman class because our football team had managed a school-record five wins the year before and our trustees, harboring visions of a winning season and grateful alumni, decided the heavens would hold if we relaxed our standards enough to let in a few guys who scored a lot better in the weight room than they did on their SATs. Or in Pardo’s case, a guy who proudly claimed “a year abroad” on his college application without mentioning that it would have been four years, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, had his stint not ended suddenly and dishonorably when Pardo invented a new salute for the MPs who tracked him down in the back of a bar after a three-day Bangkok bender.

  Still, he was all Ham Tech could have asked for and then some, a bruising six-foot-two, 230-pound fullback who could run a 4.7 forty and would’ve rewritten our meager record book if he hadn’t blown out his knee on the first play from scrimmage. Blew it out all the way — anterior, posterior, and medial collateral ligaments — and thus there he was, two weeks into another four-year hitch, marooned in a full-leg cast at a rainy liberal-arts school in upstate New York, a hundred miles from a good time in every direction.

  Pardo grabbed at the only lifeline he could see — the fraternity system. He fell in with the good-natured guys of Theta Delta Ki and gained sixty-five pounds his freshman year, earning a spot on the Wall of Fame at the local brewery. The next fall, on the strength of his party credentials, he ran unopposed for social chairman, vowing to make TDX “the beer and trim center of Ham Tech.”

  Jeremy is Pardo’s polar opposite. He first came to the Hill in December of ’94, a seventeen-year-old high-school senior and 125-pound bag of nerves up for one night — his first ever away from home — to see the school he’d set his mind on applying to early-decision. Awed by the library tour, blown away by the math center, he emerged into the main quad at 9:00, fingering the packets of Ovaltine in his coat pocket and wondering if it could really be true that the reading room stayed open all night. He would’ve headed straight across campus to the room of the nerd who was hosting him if he hadn’t promised his father, a TDX from the class of 1970, that he’d stop in on the fraternity and bring back a picture of Dad’s old room.

  Pardo’s current one, as it turned out.

  Figuring Jeremy was a “prospective,” as we called potential brothers, Pardo told him he could have his photo, but not until he’d had a “sip of the duck.” And then he led an uneasy Jeremy down into the basement.

  The “duck” was the beer bong that about twenty of us were passing around as we plotted our strategy for House Party Weekend. Jeremy had never seen one before, and it must have looked harmless enough. At one end, a plastic funnel with Donald Duck’s head painted on it, and running from that a couple feet of rubber tubing. Pardo pitched it as a lesson in physics and told him it would only take a few seconds, then handed him the rubber tubing and told him to put his thumb over the opening and have a seat. Jeremy did so, and someone promptly handed him a Playboy. Apparently he’d never seen one of those before, either, and while he paged slowly through the twelve-page spread of Miss December, his eyes widening under his glasses, Pardo poured two and a half beers into the funnel I was holding up in the air.

  “Okay,” Pardo said, “put the tube in your mouth, and when I say, ‘Go,’ take your thumb off the tube and open your throat. It’s that simple. Ready?”

  Jeremy nodded.

  “Go!”

  Turns out the kid could open his throat. Gravity did the rest, and ten seconds later Jeremy had thirty ounces of beer in him. He leaped from the chair, staggered in circles for a few seconds, then started to hiccup, then giggle, then got control of himself and decided, as the head rush of all head rushes hit him, that he was in no hurry to head back across campus and hit the hay, but rather he’d just hang with his new brothers for a while, if that was all right with us. It was, and when someone suggested he try a beer the regular way, in a can, Jeremy giggled and took it, and when someone else gave him back his Playboy and asked him what he thought of Miss December, he giggled again, turned to the centerfold, and, at our prodding, read to us her turn-ons and turnoffs. Just like that, he was one of the guys, and he was still with us an hour later, when Pardo pointed out that it was the ten-year anniversary of the change in the drinking law, the rise of the legal age from eighteen to twenty-one. This realization, mixed with the beer, aroused the latent political consciousness in all of us, and soon we’d decided there was nothing for it but to round up some freshmen girls and road-trip to Albany, an hour away, where we’d drink with them on the steps of the state capitol in protest of the heartless law that had doomed so many of our brothers to celibacy.

  We couldn’t come up with the girls, but Pardo pulled his 1985 Ford Granada (TDX spelled out along the doors in black electrical tape) around to the front of the frat, and seven of us piled in, including little Jeremy, who sat in the middle, clutching a beer ball between his legs and singing, in full voice, the rugby song we taught him as we headed for the highway.

  God made pretty white ankles

  And God made big golden beers

  God made pretty white ankles

  To hoist up over pretty white ears

  We handed Jeremy a penknife and told him to carve his initials into the ceiling, an honor usually reserved for the brothers, and he was doing just that when Pardo hit a patch of Thruway ice and the car started to fishtail. We clipped a pickup coming the other way, and the jolt brought the penknife, clutched in both of Jeremy’s hands, down hard into the beer ball, which exploded like a balloon. Jerem
y pissed himself as we spun out of control across the meridian, and he shat himself when we broke through the guardrail and rocketed down the steep embankment.

  In most other cars we would have been finished, but the Granada was a boat, built for balance, and she kept her feet even as we plunged two hundred feet down the hill, narrowly missing three different trees, any one of which would have killed us. We slowed, finally, as the hill leveled off, and then slammed to a stop, fender first, against a tree stump, the four doors crushed shut, the grille of the Ford into the ground at a thirty-degree angle.

  Our stuck horn led the state troopers right to us. From inside the car, bruised, shaken, but essentially okay, we saw their bright lights bobbing down the long hill, then saw them brighten as they reached the bottom and started toward us. Four state troopers stopped in a semicircle around our wrecked cruiser, their lights illuminating its cargo — six of TDX’s finest and one seventeen-year-old high-school senior, all soaked to the skin in Matt’s beer and reeking of human shit.

  We spent the night in a Utica jail cell, six of us at one end and Jeremy at the other. After soiling himself both ways in the car, he completed the trifecta in the cell, when his maiden hangover kicked in, and though he was a sorry sight and we were responsible, not one of us was man enough to brave the mess and lend him a hand. He lay sprawled there through the night, clutching the toilet with both arms, apologizing between sobbing dry heaves to God and to his parents and to his high-school math teacher, promising all of them that if he could just survive this night, he would go to a state school, any state school, if there was still one left that would have him.

  Jeremy started out at Ham Tech the next fall. It seems his old man had given enough money over the years that it would take more than one night of legal trouble to keep his son out of the freshman class. We rushed him, of course. He was already a legend in our halls, and we needed every curve-killer we could get our hands on to keep the administration off our backs. Pardo became his big brother, and soon they were inseparable. Jeremy, who would pass the CPA exam as a sophomore, saw to it that Pardo kept up the C–average he needed to get his diploma, and in return Pardo showed Jeremy that life on the Hill was more than math and econ.

  Both wound up in the city after graduation. Jeremy put in two years at Coopers & Lybrand and then was snapped up by the venture capital firm he works for now, where he hauls in big bucks telling his bosses which greasy startups might grow into the next Microsoft. And Pardo? He works for the governor. Splits his time between Albany and the city. A “roving political aide” he calls himself, which seems to mean part bodyguard and part hatchet man, standing to the left of the podium at the old man’s speeches and working “in the field” the rest of the time, digging up dirt on anyone who might make noises about mounting a campaign.

  As often as I can get away with, I treat Pardo, a true Knicks fan, to our client seats here at the Garden, and tonight I comped Jeremy, too, as thanks for his help on the Brice account.

  As the fourth quarter starts, the game is tight and the crowd into it, chanting, “Deee-fense!” when the ‘Wolves have the ball and rising as one every time the Knicks score. Tonight has been a Sprewell special, Latrell alternately shooting the Knicks out of the game and then running them back into it, all the while giving Coach Van Gundy the look that only Spree can give him; a pinched, tortured expression as if Coach were just then, at that moment, passing a stone the size of an apple but knew it was a baby next to the one behind it. Now Spree takes a pass, darts into the lane, draws three defenders, ignores a wide-open Houston in the corner, and hits an impossible, twisting runner to give the Knicks the lead back. The crowd goes nuts, and the Minny coach raises his hands in exasperation and signals for a timeout.

  “It’s a different game from down here, isn’t it?” I say to Jeremy as the players leave the floor.

  “I’ll say. Thanks for the ticket, Jake.”

  “Sure.”

  “How did I do in prepping you? Did you get your girl?”

  I take a sip of beer. “I don’t know yet.”

  Pardo looks over. “Good luck getting trim details out of Jake,” he says. “He treats them like state secrets.”

  Jeremy takes a sip of his beer. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that account, Jake.”

  “And?”

  “Well, there were some funny things in that file.”

  I hold up a hand. “I don’t want to know, Jeremy. We gave the partner our report already. If Brice is a tax cheat, I’m on his side now.”

  Jeremy smiles. “Okay,” he says.

  “Would you look at that,” says Pardo, as the Knick City Dancers bounce onto the court, fan out into formation, and sit down on the wooden floor, facing us. They cross their legs in perfect unison, open them, and cross them again.

  “How’s the desk clerk?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head dismissively.

  “New York women — forget ’em. L.A., Jake. I was out there last week. Goddamn.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Jeremy.

  “They get their tits done in high school,” he says. Jeremy’s eyes widen. “I mean it. If you aren’t a C cup by senior year, they boo you out of homeroom.” Pardo shakes his head wistfully.

  A cell phone goes off in the middle of us, and we all look down.

  “Not me,” says Pardo.

  “Not me,” says Jeremy.

  “Not —,” I say, but it is, and I look in surprise at my jacket pocket.

  “Since when do you have a cell phone?” asks Pardo.

  “Last week,” I say, rising. “Work. I better take this out in the hall.”

  They stand to let me by, and I walk through the crowd, then down the aisle and up the ramp into the quiet back halls of the Garden. I walk to a pillar, my back to the ramp and the crowd beyond it. Only one person has my cell phone number. I take the phone from my pocket.

  “Hello?”

  “Jake?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Mimi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  She doesn’t speak for a few seconds. I touch my hand to the cool gray pillar. We’ve passed twice in the firm’s hallways since last Friday night. Since Nina Torring. Neither of us said a word.

  “Can I see you, Jake?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t have much time,” she says.

  “You’re a runner, aren’t you?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where the river walkway starts?”

  “On Sixty-fourth Street.”

  “Meet me there, along the railing. In twenty minutes.”

  I put the phone back into my jacket and walk back down the ramp and into the Garden crowd again. Into the high-priced seats, through perfume and cologne, pretty people in designer clothes. I reach our section and shake my head at Pardo and Jeremy. “Tax emergency, guys. I gotta go.”

  “Heartless,” says Pardo. “Only ten minutes left. McSorley’s at midnight?”

  I look at him. “Maybe.”

  He looks hard at me. “You sly bastard,” he says.

  Jeremy salutes me. “Thanks for the seats, Jake.”

  I make my way through the crowd again, up the ramp and into the Garden lobby, gauging the game by the sounds behind me, groans and staccato shouts when the T-Wolves score, mass roars when the Knicks pour it on. I walk through the big doors and out onto Seventh Avenue, the night clear and cool as I cross the street, wave down a cab, and slide inside. “Sixty-fourth Street, on the East Side,” I tell him. “By the river.” He swings onto Thirty-fourth Street and heads east.

  Not a word between Mimi Lessing and me since I crouched beside her Friday night and mouthed, “Go.” Since I cut the panties off Nina Torring and Mimi couldn’t watch any longer. The driver turns north on First Avenue and heads up the quiet streets, past the dark and silent UN, the river just a hundred yards east of us now, a breeze coming through the op
en cab window. Friday night was all I could have asked for. More. A seduction like none other, ever. A seduction charged by the history between us, by the gold ring gleaming in the nightstand drawer. But charged most of all by Mimi Lessing, not just listening this time but sitting close enough to touch her and seeing everything. Seeing Nina stripped and oiled and spread. Seeing her helpless. Seeing it and knowing, as only a woman could, what it was doing to her; what the ties, the music, the ice, the cruel denial were doing deep inside Nina Torring.

  By the end Mimi couldn’t watch. She could only rock slowly, her hands in her dress. I lifted her chin, touching her for the first time, and she was beautiful, her cheeks on fire, her eyes… there’s no describing them. I sent her away and finished off Nina Torring, and it was the fuck of my life. But when it was over, when I’d cut her wrists loose and watched from the doorway as she covered her breasts and turned her face into the bed, too weak even to free her ankles, I stepped from her apartment and closed the door behind me, and I wasn’t thinking of the delicate, untouchable adviser I’d just broken so slowly, so beautifully, so completely, but of the girl who’d watched me break her. I was seeing again the shock in Mimi’s eyes when I told her to go, her halting steps as she backed out of the room. And as I stepped out onto Sullivan Street and felt the air on my face, I knew that I’d either drawn Mimi in for good or lost her forever.

  The cab turns east again, onto Sutton Place, and we glide past wide, clean sidewalks, past posh buildings with gilt awnings. A four-block enclave that gives way to York as we speed out of the Fifties and then up into the Sixties and, suddenly, we’re here. “Right here,” I tell the driver, and he pulls over to the corner. I pay him, step from the cab, walk up the steps of the overpass and then along the concrete bridge that leads over the street and toward the water. And I see her. Alone, tiny, standing at the railing fifty yards away, wearing a white sweater and a blue dress that the wind, stronger now, lifts away from her bare calves. I walk to the end of the overpass and then down the curving ramp and onto the river walkway. She turns and sees me, watches me walk toward her, and then turns and looks out again over the water. I step to the railing, a few feet away from her, and we look out together at the black waves.